There are a lot of different things that you have to take care of in content marketing. You have to make sure that your research is on point, the quality of the content is outstanding and the optimization is properly done as well.

 

Considering the number of things that you have to manage, it can get a little hectic to deal with all of them. But, that’s not an issue if you know the right tools to use. With the proper tools at your disposal, all the tasks will be able to get accomplished easily.

 

In this post, we are going to be looking at 10 valuable tools that can help you meet your content marketing needs.

 

Let’s get started.

 

10 Valuable Tools to Meet Your Content Marketing Needs

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Here is a list of the tools that you can use to ease up the content marketing process.

 

1. Ahrefs

 

One of the first and primary things that you have to do in content marketing is keyword research. That is because, in most content marketing mediums, such as blogs, product descriptions and website texts etc., you have to use the right keywords to rank your website in the SERPs.

 

So, considering that keyword research is one of the first steps that you have to take, the first tool on our list is Ahrefs.

 

If you have any affinity with SEO, you’ll know that Ahrefs is a bit of an icon when it comes to keyword research tools. It’s one of the industry giants, paralleled only by names like SEMrush and Ubersuggest.

 

 

There is a lot of stuff that you can do with Ahrefs other than keyword research. Discussing all of them is not within the scope of this article. However, since we are mentioning this tool in the context of keyword research, let’s just list some of the metrics that you can find using it:

 

• Keyword difficulty
• Search volume
• Total clicks
• CPC
• Global volume

 

As we mentioned, there’s a lot of other stuff that you can get with this tool as well, but we’re going to suffice with this brief description since we do want to stick to brevity.

 

2. Idea Generator by Portent

 

Once you have your keyword strategy all mapped out, the next thing that you have to do is get started on creating the content.

 

Now, there is one thing that we should clarify here. Content marketing is not only about writing and publishing blogs. There’s a whole lot to content marketing other than that.

 

But, for a lot of firms and brands, creating blog posts can be the most vital and important element of the content marketing strategy.

 

Keeping this in mind, we’re going to discuss the next tool i.e. the idea generator by Portent.com.

 

 

When you want to create a blog post, you have to make sure that everything, from the title to the conclusion, is readable, exciting and engaging.

 

The idea generator by Portent is basically a tool that will help you come up with great titles and headers for your blog posts. Assuming that you have to write a lot of blogs on the same niche regularly, you will find the title ideas to be very helpful for giving your creativity a boost.

 

Using this tool is simple. All you need to do is open up the webpage and enter your keyword in the space provided. After that, the tool will generate titles one by one. If you like a title, you can save it. If you don’t like it, you can click on the ‘See Another Title’ button to get a new one.

 

3. Google Docs

 

Chronologically, the next thing that you have to do after doing the groundwork is writing the content. And for that, you need to have some good word processing software.

 

This is regardless of the fact that you want to write a blog or a description or an email etc. A text editor or word processing software is something that you need to necessarily have.

 

And for that, we really don’t need to look past Google Docs.

 

 

There’s basically a duopoly in the word processing market nowadays. People either use Google Docs, or they use MS Word. Sure, Libre Office is also a little popular but it’s not on the same level as these two.

 

The main benefit and advantage that Google Docs has over MS Word is the free availability. Although MS Word is, in several aspects, better than G Docs, the latter has the much-needed perk of being free. You just need to sign in to your Google account and you’ll be good to go.

 

The vastness of the features provided by Google Docs does not permit us to mention them all here. However, we can list a general categorization of the functions that you can get to enjoy:

 

• Various font styles and sizes
• Various formatting options such as adding indents, bullets, numbered lists etc.
• Option for inserting images, tables, drawings and charts
• File sharing and collaboration options

4. Hemingway Editor

 

After you are done writing the content for your content marketing needs, the next thing that you have to do is optimize it.

 

There are a lot of different facets of content optimization. For example, you have to make sure that the content is free from all types of spelling and grammatical imperfections.

 

In fact, during the optimization phase, you pretty much have to make sure that there is no type of imperfection left in the content at all. One of these types of imperfections is high readability.

 

And that is where Hemingway can help you.

 

 

In a nutshell, Hemingway is a tool that detects readability issues in your content and highlights them for easy visualization. It also gives your content a readability grade that describes how hard it is to read.

 

Hemingway comes with ample text editing and formatting options in the in-built text editor. If you want, you can write your content from scratch right from within the tool.

 

5. Grammarly

 

Just as removing readability issues is important for content optimization, the same goes for grammar and spelling errors.

 

Grammarly is a popular tool that can help you find and fix grammar and spelling mistakes in your content. It also allows you to fix other aspects of your content such as the delivery, engagement and clarity.

 

 

One of the best things about Grammarly is that it is free to start and it does not have any limitations on the number of uses. If you want, you can keep using it indefinitely as a free member without any issues.

 

If we wanted to sum up the awesome perks that you can enjoy with Grammarly, we can list them thus:

 

• Free to start
• Available as an online tool, browser extension, Word extension and Windows extension
• Real-time working
• Sound and intelligent error-detection

6.  Grammar Checker by Prepostseo

 

Yes, we’re discussing another grammar checker.

 

The thing about Grammarly is that while it’s an impeccable tool to use for finding grammatical errors in the content, it does require some…preamble.

 

In other words, you have to sign up first. Then, if you want to use any of the extensions, you have to download them as well.

 

The grammar checker by Prepostseo is a tool that you can use quickly without any hassle. It does not require any sort of signing up or downloading.

 

 

Obviously, there is a great disparity between the quality of these two grammar checkers. This one by Prepostseo perhaps doesn’t provide a third of the features provided by Grammarly. But it has the possibly much-needed benefit of being readily and freely available for unpaid and unregistered users.

 

Here are some features that you can enjoy with this tool:

 

• Multiple languages supported
• File uploads supported
• ‘Resolve All’ button for collectively fixing all errors

7. Yoast Content Analyzer

 

Yoast is actually a plug-in for WordPress. However, they have this free, independent tool available only called the ‘Yoast Real-Time Content Analysis’.

 

There are basically two types of assessments that you can get for your content after using this tool:

 

• Readability Assessments
• SEO Assessments

 

The readability assessments provided by the tool are pretty much along the lines of the issues that are pointed out by Hemingway. They are a little bit different, such as the results of the Flesch Reading Ease test and the number of transition words etc. But that’s not the reason why we’re mentioning this tool here.

 

 

The reason that we are mentioning this tool here is the SEO assessments. With the SEO assessments, you can check your content to see whether or not it is optimized for the search engines.

 

For example, the SEO assessments will show you the following factors in your content:

 

• Keyword density
• Focus keyword usage
• Outbound and inbound links
• Images

 

The tool will essentially point out these elements and let you know if they are present in the right number or not.

 

8. Paraphrasing Tool by Editpad

 

Paraphrasing tools can be helpful for content marketing in a variety of different ways. They can help you make the content more engaging and lively, and they can also be a good way to remove plagiarism.

 

The paraphraser by Editpad is a good tool that you can use for this purpose. It’s free to use, and it does not require registration.

 

 

There are multiple modes offered by this tool. You can choose the one that meets your needs the best. In order to get an idea about all of them, you can use them on the same piece of content to see the changes that they make.

 

The working of this tool is smart and intelligent for the most part, and it comes with various types of nifty features. Some of those features include:

 

• Support for multiple languages
• Support for file uploads
• Provides word count
• Integrated tools available

9. Check-Plagiarism

 

Removing plagiarism is one of the most important things that you have to do for any type of content that you need to use for content marketing.

 

Whether you are writing a blog, a description or some website text, you have to make sure that it is unique. If it’s not, it can get penalized by the search engine.

 

Check-Plagiarism is one of the most popular plagiarism checking tools available on the internet. It comes loaded with useful features, and it works fairly accurately.

 

 

In order to use this tool, you don’t have to sign up or buy a paid plan. You can use it as a free user. However, you will have to contend with some limitations if you opt for that.

 

There are different importing options available in this tool. You can enter the content directly or upload a file from your local storage to check for plagiarism. After that, you also have the choice to exclude any specific URLs from getting included in the check.

 

While we could go on talking in detail about the features of this tool, we want to wrap this post up, so let’s just suffice on listing some of them here:

 

• 2,000-word limit for free users
• Downloadable reports
• Option to exclude URLs

10. Canva

 

Just creating written content is not the be-all and end-all of content marketing. Making the content engaging and appealing to your readers is also a very vital step that you have to take.

 

One of the main ‘engagement’ elements that necessarily has to exist in your content is graphics. They don’t have to be images or pictures. They can even be a chart or a table etc.

 

 

Canva is a free-to-start graphic designing tool that can be very useful for this purpose. There is a range of different templates, elements, fonts, effects etc. that you can use to make cover images, banners, website graphics and much more.

 

Like Grammarly, there is no usage limit in this tool. In other words, while there are other types of limitations such as unavailability of certain elements and templates etc., there is no limit to the number of times that you want to use this tool.

 

Conclusion

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Content marketing is an expansive field. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in order to create quality content and it can get a little difficult to manage it all on your own.

 

In this post, we looked at some tools and utilities that you can use online to get some help in those tasks. For example, you can use Ahrefs for conducting keyword research and you can use Portent’s idea generator for getting some titles for your blog.